Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Jan Gentry, a bay area teacher, will discuss many things, but her stint on Survivor Thailand is not one of them.
By JOHN BALZ, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 19, 2002
TAMPA -- If I were sending Jan Gentry flowers I would send her favorites, shasta daisies and birds of paradise. Gentry's a Home Depot gal and could easily kill an afternoon at the nursery with her Capital One credit card. If I were really trying to get her attention I might renew her subscription to Runner's World magazine or give her a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, size medium, a bit loose through the shoulders just the way she likes it. What she has always wanted, and we're getting kind of personal here, is a facelift.
Mind you, Gentry is 53 and happily married to a tallish man named William, whom she calls "Mr. Bill," so at best we'd just be friends. Still, my attempts to woo her would consist of 18 holes of golf in the morning and deep-sea fishing off Clearwater Beach in the afternoon. I would be sure to keep a chess board, a pack of cards, and a copy of Mary Higgins Clark's latest thriller on the boat. If I were well-connected I would get Tom Hanks to join us and dish the dirt on the making of Forrest Gump. For dinner we would eat fajitas, lobsters, T-bone steaks, corn on the cob, garlic mashed potatoes, Snickers bars, maybe an orange or two. Then again, Gentry doesn't eat much. She doesn't sleep much, either, so there'd be time, after dinner, to sit around listening to Willie Nelson while we split a six-pack of Beck's beer and smoked Cuban cigars.
But if Gentry wins $1-million on the reality show Survivor Thailand, which she competed in over the summer, she won't need any of my tokens of friendship. She can take her own fishing trips and sing Willie Nelson tunes in that distinctive Texas twang. And she can buy a lifetime supply of her signature outfit: blue denim overalls.
Win or lose, all of McKitrick Elementary School, where she teaches, will certainly be watching the Tampa triathlete's stint on the largest pristine jungle island in southern Thailand, Koh Tarutao. No one knows how long she was out there -- except Gentry, producer Mark Burnett and a few in-the-know CBS executives, who, as usual, are treating the episodes and their million-dollar ending like a state secret.
Survivor, the cultural phenomenon that defined a television genre, rewards players who have quick thinking, political suavity, two burly arms and, often, two sly faces. In its fifth season, the show continues to reap huge Thursday night ratings for CBS. All of which make Gentry the network equivalent of the Pentagon handler who walks around with the briefcase of secret nuclear codes handcuffed to his wrist. CBS has forbidden her from speaking to the media, and even Mr. Bill, her three children and two step-children will have to tune into the hour-long episodes to find out how she fared.
So, do the first-graders at McKitrick have a millionaire for a teacher?
"There's not much I can say," said CBS spokeswoman Johanna Fuentes. "Our standard response is we cannot confirm or deny anything."
Fuentes estimates that she uses that phrase "hundreds" of times a year.
We can confirm that Gentry was born Janet Belknap in Fort Worth on Oct. 31, 1948, to Donald, an executive with the Chicago-based department chain Montgomery Ward, and Winifred, a homemaker.
She was a tomboy and an athlete from the get-go. The youngest of four children, she swam in the Junior Olympics at 14. Her older brother Jim, nearly 6 feet 6, was a basketball star. Her other brother, Don Jr., died in a car accident when she was a child. Her sister's name is Carol.
The neighborhood was typical suburbia, except for this: Marguerite Claverie, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, lived near Gentry's junior high school. Gentry was in the crowd as president John F. Kennedy's motorcade wound through the streets of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 en route to his assassination. Later, Oswald's mother tried to coax Stripling Junior High students into her house to cut out newspaper articles about her son and to eat cookies. Gentry declined, according to friend Sue Sferra.
Gentry graduated from Arlington Hills High School in 1967. From there she bounced from Texas Tech University, where most of her friends were enrolled, to the University of Texas at Austin, where she met her first husband, Jef Russell, on a blind date. They married in 1971. She never seemed to take college seriously, but eventually completed a bachelor's degree in elementary education at Lamar University and then a special education teaching certificate at Texas Woman's University.
The couple moved to Colorado and then back to Fort Worth.
Throughout the 1980s Gentry spent her free time crabbing, running marathons and volunteering with the Junior League, playing the role of Santa Claus at a charity event.
She tried her hand at selling hand-painted baskets and gave birth to three children -- Jef, 26, a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts; Molly, 24, who works in real estate; and William, 18, who turned out to be a 6-foot-4, 250-pound high school tight end.
Holidays were a giant production, part Hallmark card, part National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, with logs burning, cameras flashing, wrapping paper and gifts everywhere. On birthdays Gentry marked her children's growth on a height chart and served them breakfast in bed.
Having played with Martina Navratilova in a local pro-am event, Gentry became the tennis star's personal assistant, housesitting, driving her car and opening hundreds of pieces of mail a week.
In 1987, in need of something else to do, Gentry began a new career in the Fort Worth Independent School District teaching special education.
"She was meant to teach," Sferra said.
She drove a black-and-white Checker cab with a vinyl interior to school and taught emotionally disturbed children. When the kids acted up, she drove them to the lake to fish.
Gentry and Russell divorced in the early 1990s. It was a difficult time, but Gentry decided to stay in Beaumont, Texas, at least until Molly graduated from high school. While at Vidor Elementary School, she befriended Lisa Tyndall, who set her up with William Gentry. They met in a Beaumont parking lot in 1992, with Gentry wearing red cowboy boots. Four years later they were married in a small, low-key ceremony at his house.
"My dad is not as wild and spontaneous as she is," said stepdaughter Lisa Gentry, 20. "They give each other a good balance."
William took a job managing a fleet of cement trucks in Winter Park and Gentry followed him.
Although she had spent her entire teaching career with special needs children, Orange County's school district wouldn't accept her Texas special ed credentials, a rejection that Gentry still can't believe.
Instead, the district hired her to teach at Pine Hill Elementary. Gentry worked part-time jobs too, five months selling clothes at Ann Taylor and five months at Walt Disney World, where she even put on a Minnie Mouse costume. She sent the extra money home to Texas and visited her ailing mother twice a year.
William transferred to Tampa and Gentry took a temporary $26,252-a-year position at Bellamy Elementary on Wilsky Boulevard, teaching second grade. Within six months she had landed a full-time position, and when McKitrick opened on Lutz Lake Fern Road last fall she moved.
Her classroom evaluations are overwhelmingly positive. Her Bellamy supervisor wrote "Jan is in a 'one-of-a-kind' category. A dynamic teacher!"
Wonder if it did her any good on Survivor, where it seems everyone's an infantile personality.
On a typical day Gentry rises at 5:15 a.m., lifts weights at the Hunter's Green Country Club for 45 minutes and drives her red Mazda Miata convertible 17 miles to begin teaching in Room 202 at 7:30 a.m. sharp.
She greets her 23 first-graders with one of "three H's": a hug, a handshake or a high-five.
A sign is taped to her classroom door: "Welcome to the Jungle" (in honor of Survivor). She reads from a wooden rocking chair with a lime green cushion, often reciting the story of a toothy hero named Captain Underpants because she believes you need a sense of humor to get through life. In the corner is a web of chicken wire in which she catches her students art work. Ask her for something and it may take her two days to find it.
"(Jan's) really more big picture," said Tyndall. "Details were not her thing. She can fly by the seat of her pants and pull something off."
She doesn't usually wear makeup -- although she has been seen in mascara since returning from Thailand. She doesn't bother with a hair brush, preferring to keep her reddish-blond locks in pigtails or in a a single braid. She's never bothered with a lesson plan. Psychologists would call her creative, and on a Myers-Briggs test she's probably the guardian provider or the artistic ambassador.
Technology gives her fits. Teachers use a spreadsheet program to evaluate their students. The program spits out a percentage at the end. But for Gentry, the numbers never seem to come out right.
Around school she is known for being everybody's cheerleader and for her wry wit.
"You might get the wrong punch line (from her) but that's part of her charm," said friend Kathy Kelly.
After school she usually runs 3 to 5 miles and then sprints up and down the bleachers at Wharton High School, up the road from her home.
Pointing to her nonconfrontational personality and her emaciated figure at the beginning of the school year, those who know Gentry believe she was a formidable competitor who made it, if not to the final two, at least to the final four.
Those who don't know her don't give her much of a chance. Most older contestants have had brief stays on Survivor, and according to a poll on the fan site www.survivorfever.net, viewers think the tribe kicked Gentry off the island first. Intertops.com an online gambling service that keeps odds on the show, has her at 19-1, dead last with four other contestants.
Jan and William Gentry live in one of the older subdivisions in Hunter's Green, Wynstone, just east of Bruce B. Downs Boulevard in New Tampa. They are the third owners of a house they purchased four years ago for $212,000. It is a single-story house, roughly 2,600 square feet with a tile roof, pool and screened-in lanai.
Wynstone is a deed-restricted community and the Gentrys keep a tidy yard. Ann Johnson, the property manager and enforcer of those restrictions, says "I wouldn't even recognize her if she walked in the door." She remains mostly unknown to her neighhors as well.
Hunter's Green is a gated community. Soliciting is strictly forbidden and its residents have a long and proud tradition of calling the police when journalists are caught knocking on doors.
I went anyway.
Gentry came to the door in overalls and a pirate's goldhoop earrings. She's smaller than her Junior Olympic days, about 5-foot-6, 115 pounds. She had on black-frame glasses -- her driver's license lists "corrective lenses" as a restriction.
Standing on a welcome mat, she said she had reached the final round of three and then lost when her weary hand slipped off a carved idol during the final physical challenge.
"I was going to spend part of the money on a new boat," she said.
Kidding, CBS. I'm kidding.
You want to know what she really said?
"You want to come inside and have a glass of wine?"
She led me to her back room, where the sound from a movie on Lifetime came through 6-foot-tall speakers (her husband is an electronics fanatic).
"Would you like white?" she asked. It was Sept. 11 and she had her hair pulled back with red, white and blue bands in that single braid. "You know, just because I can't talk to you doesn't mean I can't be nice. Reporters from TV and radio stations call all the time, they've been to my school, but no one has ever come over here before. I probably shouldn't have let you in. I guess next time I won't."
She pulled a bottle out of the refrigerator; a fish bowl full of beer bottle caps rested on top of the giant appliance. Stuck to the front was an 8- by 11-inch collage of photos of friends and family that she took to Koh Tarutao.
She sat cross-leg in a lounge chair, rubbing her feet.
"I e-mail with CBS every day. They tell me what I can't do with the press, what to watch out for, the traps you set. They want to keep the suspense for the viewers. I think it's meant to seem like we're on the island right now. I'm not supposed to give formal interviews but this isn't formal; you're just having a drink with me. My wine-drinking buddy," Gentry said.
I asked if America was going to see her in an outfit other than overalls. She smiled. Then she leapt up and rushed to the mantel, grabbing what appeared to be some type of shell and a wooden water jug, mementos of her time on Koh Tarutao.
"You shouldn't see these," she said, squirreling the items away in a safe place.
She gave a house tour. Photos are everywhere: framed on end tables, on tile counter tops, dozens of them loose in a shallow bowl in her living room. Her son William keeps a messy room and favors Corona beer. But overall the house is considerably neater than her classroom, and I wondered if that was Mr. Bill's taming influence. Beethoven the guinea pig sleeps on pine bedding in the front hallway and Fred the cockatiel swings on a perch close to the kitchen.
Mr. Bill sat on the carpet, shirtless, putting in the final screws into a roll-out computer keyboard drawer.
"I'll tell you what," he said. "She's tough as nails."
"I'm tough?" Jan said, in mocking disbelief. "Does that mean I'm hard to live with? And what aspect of me would lead you to say that?" She laughed.
I asked Mr. Bill where he takes his wife on special occasions and he listed Malio's, Bern's, "all the good places."
He waved me into the master bathroom and pointed to a drawing of girl in blue overalls with pink and yellow polka dots, a giant smile taking up half her face and a flower in her hair.
"That's a self-portrait," he said. "She drew that when she was 4 or 5. That's exactly who she is today. It's remarkable how someone can do that, how someone can know who they are so young. What you see is what you get with Jan."
-- Times Staff Writer Eric Deggans and Researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. John Balz can be reached at (813) 269-5313 or at balz@sptimes.com.